On my PlaceMakers business card, my job title is “Storyteller.” I figured a graduate degree in English and a two-decade career in journalism gave me a certain amount of credibility in that department. What I didn’t count on, however, was what the title seemed to imply to most folks. To them, I was the spin doctor.

“We’ve got some great ideas, a really cool project,” potential clients might say. “But people just don’t get it. Time to educate them. Win ‘em over. Go work your magic so we can get back on track.”

Having worked in communities big and small across the continent, we’ve had ample opportunity to test ideas and find approaches that work best. Urban design details. Outreach tactics. Implementation tricks. Many of these lessons are transferable, which is why we’ve created “Back of the Envelope,” a weekly feature where we jot ‘em down for your consideration.

For those looking to expand public engagement and collaborative process at the community level, this week presents a curious convergence of news and ideas. Setting the stage was CNU20’s “Charrettes and the Next Generation of Public Involvement,” an afternoon breakout session exploring a fairly provocative (for New Urbanists) question: In this era of limited resources, is the traditional charrette still a viable model of engagement and collaborative design and, if not, can it be retooled for relevance?

Having worked in communities big and small across the continent, we’ve had ample opportunity to test ideas and find approaches that work best. Urban design details. Outreach tactics. Implementation tricks. Many of these lessons are transferable, which is why we’ve created “Back of the Envelope,” a weekly feature where we jot ‘em down for your consideration.

Picture this scene: It’s your regularly scheduled city council meeting and the room is packed. Roughly two thirds of the audience is wearing matching red t-shirts with stickers reading “NO!” while the other third, sporting all manner of dress, displays stickers reading “YES!” There’s considerable tension in the air and it’s clear that things could turn ugly at the slightest provocation.

Having worked in communities big and small across the continent, we’ve had ample opportunity to test ideas and find approaches that work best. Urban design details. Outreach tactics. Implementation tricks. Many of these lessons are transferable, which is why we’ve created “Back of the Envelope,” a weekly feature where we jot ‘em down for your consideration.

If you’re a city or town, it’s a fair bet you’ve long since accepted the internet. People meet, pay bills, go shopping, research causes and self-diagnose illness online, and they expect to engage government in similarly convenient ways. You’re fine with that. In turn, you’ve responded with all the things they’ve clamored for: municipal websites, email updates, tools for paying fines electronically, and more.

Now you’re all caught up with their expectations. Or at least you were, until Web 2.0, the social web, came along. Now there’s new benchmarks and, once again, your constituents expect you to get on board.

Maybe it’s like the argument that given enough time, a chimp with a keyboard would eventually hammer out Hamlet, but I’m thinking the messy GOP presidential campaign is inching its way towards clarity.

Not that the process will produce outcomes extreme partisans will like. Disappointment is often the byproduct of a clarifying experience, especially if success is measured by outcomes perfectly in sync with the purest of visions. In that sense, the Republican ordeal might have something to teach us about public processes in the communities and regions in which we work.

Given the means, most of us who work with communities to design and implement form-based codes would opt for a full-blown process, one that involves lots of community outreach, education and hands-on idea-testing in a charrette. But every situation is unique and sometimes you need something a bit more immediate.

Sometimes the process you use is the one the situation imposes. Kind of like sports, where, if you want to win, you’d better adapt to the way the game unfolds before you, as opposed to insisting on imposing a plan you carefully worked out the night before. And since I’m headquartered in Canada, where hockey is the game, let’s talk hockey strategy.

That Darwinist admonition has been invoked to justify tons of brilliant and tons of stupid strategies for coping with change. It’s applied these days to the rise of Web-enabled social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter. And since New Urbanists are early adopters of new approaches to conceptualizing and coping with change, there’s a lot of conversation going on right now about how to – and whether to – employ these new tools.

On June 10, here at the 17th annual Congress for the New Urbanism, Bill Lennertz, executive director of the National Charrette Institute, and Ken Snyder, a founder of PlaceMatters, led a half-day workshop on “Hi-Tech, Hi-Touch Public Meeting Facilitation Tools for Charrettes.” Below, Lennertz describes how the NCI is exploring the strategic possibilities and the gadgetry of social networking tools.

The path to merging public engagement strategies and the rapidly evolving Web tools is not going to be clear anytime soon. We don’t have sorting mechanisms just yet that help us decide whether a new tool enables a paradigm shift or is just another distraction from purposeful planning. We might speed our adaptation if we paid attention to the discussion going on in the realm of the techies who invented all this stuff.

One of the essential takeaways from Shirky’s work is the notion that, with social networking, we are likely talking about a challenge of “different” rather than just “more.” In another video, he makes the key point that our frustration with what we call information overload is actually about a breakdown in the filters we’ve evolved for determining the value of information input. Instead of fretting over the redesign of old-era filtering mechanisms that focused on editing/censoring/gate keeping at information sources, we must develop new ones on our end of the information stream to cope with what is likely to be a permanent condition of accelerating access to everything, all the time, everywhere.

What that implies for New Urbanists’ adaptation strategies for public engagement is that we have to first recognize that this new environment is the one in which we’ll be operating and that our responsibilities for refining our own filtering systems and for helping clients and citizens develop theirs will only grow.